


Upstream

by Asimiento



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: M/M, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-08 14:55:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13460619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asimiento/pseuds/Asimiento
Summary: “Why does it feel like we’ve met before? We must have met before.”“Can’t have been. I would’ve remembered.”





	1. A ghost spot

**Author's Note:**

> For Aquarius season.

Nothing’s changed here. 

Oliver is not a man of the hard sciences. He cannot presume to fathom the groundwork of the physical world, the machinery commanding the march of time. And so, when he posits that there may be some points in the world in which time will dilate and move in honeyed languor, trapping some places in the luster of an endless golden age—perhaps a snag in the earth’s gravitational pull—he’s aware that it’s all farce. And yet, here he is, sinking his slippered feet into what might as well be the same sand and stone, the same sun-lacquered sea, the same waves lapping up the same shoreline, somehow unspoiled by the twelve years that have passed since he last saw B.

Seafoam hiss and whitened sky blur into signal noise and static. The surf’s rhythm pulls him into the gentle tide of a celluloid dream. One where he presses his nose into the glass as the same scene loops on the other side, again and again and again. Somebody’s hand, thin and pale, stretches out to meet his. His face is offscreen.

 

* * *

 

“So, is it autobiographical?”

Elio looks up from his paper coffee cup, the folded edges wrinkled where he’s been picking at the rim. San Francisco must course through a forever tension, he thinks. It’s there in the creases of his coffee cup, the pile of cigarettes cooling in the ashtray before him and the one he’s inhaling into, the small fissures in its sloping stone, the low crackle of an audio recorder whirring over a steel countertop, the broken spine of his companion’s paperback like ruptured roadworks, the impatient tilt tucked into a simple _“so.”_

“Yes and no.”

Anita sets her glasses onto her lap, wiping the lenses hard with the smooth lining of her jacket. She inspects her job, breathes fog into the glass and repeats the motion, each slide a metronome beat. 

He shrugs. “I’ve always imagined the possibilities of people's lives sweeping like a fugue. A polyphonic tapestry of contrapuntal melody, forking off from the same motifs, the same rhythms. If the life I’m living is one of the staves, another is the possibility of the story here. They’re the choices I didn’t make. Couldn’t make, I guess.”

Anita nods. “Like a fantasy life.”

“Like a fantasy life, but this shouldn’t be a surprise. Most of the details are fictionalized— highly fictionalized—obviously, but what’s there is… Perhaps if I’d been kinder to myself more than a decade ago.”

Anita lights up a cigarette. He considers the creases along lid's edge, like the crinkles at the mouth of his coffee cup. “Was Oliver inspired by anybody in particular?”

Elio laughs. “Maybe.”

“Do you give all the magazines a hard time, Elio Perlman?”

Elio puts his cigarette down. He leans into the tape recorder, lifts it so every word is caught. “Of course I made him up.”

 

* * *

 

_Corsi e ricorsi_ —the seasonal spiral of human history. One day, decades ago, James Joyce happened upon the work of a heretofore obscure historiographer and put forth his misreading of The New Science in the snarled argosies of Finnegans Wake. Course and recourse, history doomed to repeat itself. The same periods, the same movements, the same trauma, flurrying out in a widening gyre, chaos to order to chaos. And now some bastardized exegesis of a misinterpretation of an already rocky theory is swirling in Oliver’s head as he regards the little whirlpool he’s absentmindedly pushed into his Negroni. The Promethean cycle from creation to discovery to torment, except Prometheus chooses it, again and again, reopening the same wounds, perhaps to his perverse delight.

There’s somebody sitting on the table outside, both arms draped over the rests of his seat, practically luxuriating in the daylight glow. There’s an open book resting on the man's face, pages down, and Oliver thinks of that contentious verse — _we cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit —_ without really knowing why. He cranes his neck from his placement at the bar to catch a glimpse of him and immediately ducks down the moment he realizes what he’s doing.

And so the clinking gin-and-ice whirlpool. He chews on the orange peel.

Perhaps the urban tremor he thought he’d left behind is doomed to follow him everywhere he goes, because before he realizes it, a book flops next to his glass to disturb the mindless torpor he’d been somewhat enjoying. And suddenly somebody’s encroached the barstool next to his, arm rakishly draped over the countertop, an arched brow that, Oliver infers, might expect a response.

He tries not to look up from his drink. “Yes?” He says. 

“I haven’t said anything.”

“It certainly looked like you were about to say something.”

“What did it look like I was about to say?” 

“Oh, I don’t know.” _Now,_ Oliver looks up. “ _Come here often?_ ” 

His liquid lunch interloper swivels his seat to lean back against the bar, tilting his head to point at the window. “Were you watching me, just then?” 

“God no.” Oliver realizes he’s said it too quickly. He downs the rest of his Negroni, watching present company relax into his seat.

“Okay,” he says, and just like that, he offers his hand. “Elio.”

“Oliver.”

“So, since you’re obviously not from here… _come here often?_ ”

Oliver sets his drink down. “It’s funny, I haven’t actually been to B. in, oh, maybe twelve years? I was here once, for a few weeks in the summer, and haven’t been back since. You know, I have no idea what on Earth's compelled me to come back now.”

Elio bites his lip and says nothing, gaze snapping to the window as if some bewildering incident from the other side had suddenly demanded his attention.

“What about you?”

“Just visiting my parents,” Elio says, suddenly disinterested. He gets up. “I just realized, I have to be somewhere else.”

“Okay.”

Elio intrudes on his personal space one last time to reach for his book. “Well, _later_.”

Oliver belatedly realizes he might have been mocked.

 

* * *

 

Elio is practically engulfed under stacks of archives by the time his father gets to his study. He’s reviewed the folders and folders of intern catalogues and there isn’t a single Oliver in them. 

“Is this any way to conduct research?”

“These aren’t even filed in any sensible order.” Elio raises a folder over his head in the manner of a serviceman gesturing surrender. “They’re not chronological, alphabetical, not even by origin so, huh, I don’t know. You tell me.”

From the paper and carton crenellation, he watches his father cross the study to sit with him, into the field of yellowing curricula vitae. 

“What’s this about, now?”

“Remember that little story I wrote?”

“Yes, I think so. Did well in some niche circles, I believe. Oh, what was it called again? I forget…”

He punches his father in the arm. There’s a folder on by the end of the pile he thinks he might have missed. He reaches for it and opens it up. No dice.

“So?” His father inspects the same file and smiles wistfully as if briefly transported to the summer of ’88, with the temporary company of Garance, who always inexplicably smelled of apples.

_So, I think I might have accidentally based one of the characters on one of your old interns, actual or potential_ , he wants to say. Except he realizes the thought is patently ridiculous before it’s even left his mouth. Why wouldn’t he remember? And so instead he acquiesces, truthfully still, “actually, Dad, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

He starts to gather the mess of folders. His father follows suit. They clean up the study in companionable silence.

Apropos of nothing, his father comments, “you know, we’ve met and worked with and gotten to know so many wonderful people over the years, but sometimes I wonder if the wet clay of the impressions they’ve left have gathered into some composite ideal. I fear I may be stacking up all the best traits of the previous interns and challenging the next one to best all of them. Quite unfairly, I find myself privately comparing someone disagreeable in the present to someone more congenial from the past.”

Elio makes his consideration known with an exaggerated frown. His father beams, eyes crinkling at the edges. 

“Thankfully, I'm reminded that any words or images that can only ever suggest the notion of a meadow can only scarcely compare to what’s really there.”

They sit on the floor again, looking up at the carton stacked before them, shot up like spires.

In the evening, he takes his bike to town with no particular purpose. _Just to see_.

He idles by a particular bar and surveys it from the gates, watching blurred faces huddled in their own roundtables, smoke and lights frothing into the night chill, and he thinks he might have spotted Oliver in the crowd. Elio singles him out and follows his every movement—the animated gesturing with a cigarette pinched in the fingers of his left hand, slamming a beer bottle onto the table, and rising up to approach someone with cavalier panache. It’s only when he finally turns back to his table that Elio realizes it hadn’t been his Oliver at all. He takes his bike and leaves, only stopping before the theater to briefly consider that Oliver might have caught a movie. The marquee lights cut through the dark and into the last morsel of wakefulness in him, and Elio instantly feels caught in the act.

It is pitch black by the time he heads back for the house. And on the way crosses paths with another biker, speeding right past him in the dark. He belatedly realizes what he’s just seen. By the time he’s able to stop and look back, Elio only spots what might have been a blonde head of hair shrinking into the interminably sloping distance. From far away, the reflector blinks, a vanishing semaphore.

That night he dreams of an imagined memory. A quickening twining into his body and practically waning over the course of one summer, gone without a trace before he can even interrogate what he thought he knew about his own desires, the inexhaustible negotiations of aspirations and self-denials he’d long left to his youth. The impact of crashing back into gravelly shores after being, very briefly, held aloft by the tide of a dream. And in the morning he nurses a nosebleed, pushing his head against the bathroom mirror and watching, marveling thoughtlessly, on the drops of blood blooming ribbon-like in the gleaming white sink.

He wonders—a thoughtless fantasy—about the possibility that one could conjure someone into being. Blooming out of ribboned ink into real flesh and blood.

 

* * *

 

Oliver sees it in the spray of quarterlies over the faculty lounge. He can’t recall where he’s heard the name before, but it’s enough to send him picking up the magazine and flipping for the interview. Halfway through _Elio Perlman, The Art of Fiction No.146_ , he spots it: his own name. 

In an instant, the delirium that took residence in his sleep might have crawled right out of the creases of his mind to blanket his eyes in a hazy film. Or maybe he hadn’t realized he’d been coming down with something.

He picks up a copy of Elio Perlman’s novel the moment he spots it, and exhausts the whole thing in one feverish weekend, only slowing down to nurse the shakes he’d started to feel from his hands every time his eyes landed on some detail about B. that seemed almost neatly plucked straight out of his own history. Enough for him to be cross at the ridiculous notion that someone had been watching him more than a decade ago and refashioning his words, in fact, the whole slouch of his countenance, into some glamorously vampish academic. There’s some he’s almost certain has never happened, and yet somehow unerring in their placement in his mind. He’s never been particularly fond or versed in the theory of a Collective Unconscious, or were he more abreast, something _dernier cri_ or just plain recent, like Morphic Resonance. There’s a specificity that doesn’t lend itself well to the notion of a universally shared frequency of thought, and yet…

A hand claps on his shoulder and snaps him out of his daze. Nisar from the adjacent cubicle swoops in with one giant hand hovering over the crumpling papers that have somehow mysteriously replaced what used to be his work desk.

“Taking notes on romance novels, are we now?”

“Oh, it’s nothing.” 

“Sure looks like a lot of nothing.” Then Nisar gestures to the book. “Hmm, I’ve seen that around. New, isn’t it?”

“Published this quarter. Press cycle still coming in.” Oliver closes the book and makes a feeble attempt to tidy his notes. “Unnervingly familiar.” 

“Hmm, well, that’s fiction for you, right? Sometimes it unearths the stuff that’s just hidden all this time. The heart hidden under the floorboards. The whisper in the ear. That one little push.”

“Uh-huh. Funny.”

“Well, other than that, how is it?”

Oliver holds up his paperback for his colleague to inspect. “Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “It’s definitely _something_.”

In sleep, cicadas and birdsong and glistening sun drench his vision as new moments, new people, invade his blissfully uneventful impressions of B. He’s never been particularly trustful of memory but now he finds himself picking at its clockwork underside, worrying for missing parts, wondering if it were possible for an ache so biting to raze some lush corner in the landscape of his recollection into a dry patch of mostly blistering sun.

Before he knows it, he’s filed for a sabbatical and scratched at the calendar like a ticking countdown to some reckoning. The waves over B. loom in his mind, an impregnable empire daring him to cross the threshold, pummeling in time to the pounding of his own heart. And in his mind, he holds his breath and comes closer.

 

* * *

 

Elio finds Oliver three days later, stretched prone at the berm over the canal which, for a few sublime years, he’d imagined belonged only to him and to whoever came, at his discretion. Elio waits by the damp wood landing and waits. For what, he has no idea. Part of him wants to splash water in Oliver’s face and catch him off-guard. Warn the usurper he’s been caught. Another part of him feels on the cusp of vertigo, the uncanny sensation of lurching and being flipped over from his ankles.

Elio slips and keels into the water.

“Ah, fuck. Damn it.”

By the time he’s gotten his bearings, he’s standing up sopping wet, dignity left scuttling somewhere under the wet stone, and Oliver is sitting up watching him, mercifully quiet.

And when he finally speaks, Oliver says: “Come here often?”

Elio walks over to sit beside Oliver, feet squelching in the dirt and grass, shivering slightly despite the sun. “You’re _here_ ,” he huffs, with all the petulance he can bring to bear. Anything to hide his indecorous excitement.

Oliver nods. “Why? You own this place?”

Elio gives him a downward smirk, amused but still carefully coated under a crust of mild vexation. “So what if I do?”

He lies back in the grass and looks up at his strangest of companies. The Oliver in his midst that somehow, impossibly, uncannily resembled the Oliver out of his own work of fiction. All except for maybe the thinning hair and stiffer bearing, and slightly, slightly older eyes, he might as well have been the Oliver of his own design. And so he looks up, for a single second—one that stretches and stretches and stretches with the quickening of his heart—and allows himself to wonder: _did I dream you up?_

When he snaps out of it, he finds Oliver watching him too, then immediately looking away. Elio shuts his eyes tightly, willing his heart to slow down. He hears the grass rustle and thinks Oliver must be lying beside him.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Oliver says, quietly.

“You mean in this berm?”

“I mean in B.”

 

* * *

 

He realizes halfway through the tour of B. that Elio’s inveigled him into that he’s listening to a rehearsed recital. A touristy B. And so as soon as he spots one of the places he’s favored since his arrival, he grabs Elio by the wrist and makes a rather suggestive proposition. Herodotus noted the Persians as having weighed grave matters on two separate, equally important instances of dialogue: once drunk, and once sober.

Oliver makes several poor attempts to describe the B. he recalls from more than a decade ago. The sun-beaten, featureless B. in his mind that somehow seems to slip away like air, the tendrils of some new history slipping into its every surface. His stories come to walls and contradictions and he scapegoats the ointment-like gin for sloshing his memory around, feigning a poor resilience to drink.

“You must think I’m lying,” he sighs, deeply embarrassed.

“No,” Elio says, a glimmer in his eye, spine a long stretch as he reclines in his seat. “Just stupid.”

They are five drinks apiece when he comes out with it. Somewhat. As much as anyone can spit out the truth under the haze of inebriation, veins ferrying more gin than blood to his brain.

“Why does it feel like we’ve met before? We must have met before.”

Elio shakes his head in a rather exaggerated manner. “Can’t have been. I would’ve remembered.”

“That so?”

“Obviously.”

“And you’re so certain of this?”

Then, Elio simply gestures toward the whole of him, hand tracing an airy line to indicate nothing in particular. “I would’ve remembered,” he repeats, but now stripped of any glib affectation. Low and quiet, yet somehow on the frequency of some below-ground undulation. For a moment Oliver becomes acutely conscious of the momentum of the Earth. It’s rotations rocking the very floor beneath them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. I won't use inebriation to excuse my precarious behavior but the truth is this was written mostly with the guiding voice of the Holy Spirit: whiskey.
> 
> 2\. All of the pseudo-intellectual nonsense, I will concede, I am unfit to defend. If you see anything you'd like to dispute, trust me, you've won. Critiques welcome but do not engage me with fulminations against my misread of Oliver's misread of Joyce misreading Vico who, I mean, let's face it. What does that guy know, even? Anyway, I will lose for sure.
> 
> 3\. The book Elio writes is _100% not_ Call Me By Your Name. I don't want to go any further than that but like, hey. B. is present and there is a protagonist named Oliver but: that's all, folks!


	2. A fugue

On the clavier plays two melodies, syncopated, lilting at first, then soaring, racing  _alla breve_.       

Multiple sinusoidal waves, superposed along the same frequency, at different beats, interlock along the zero-cross point, again and again and again. Multiple coplanar celestial bodies, at different retrograde speeds along the same disk, align once every several Earth-centuries worth of synodic revolutions. A divine hand, unbodied, sets the rhythms of the universe, from the sweeping motions of the cosmos down to the grain of each atom. Two people return again and again to B., forever kept in its orbit, traversing the same verdant slopes, tracing the same shoreline, hearts closing fist-like, then bursting, passing through each other’s lives, again and again.

Elio remembers writing the story in bursts, weaving through coils of thought slipping away from moment to moment. Like a memory trying to outrun him, and the only way he can catch up is to write. To trap it all in the page. To exorcise the ghost in his periphery. To swim upstream.

And now, somehow, the ghost won’t leave him, still.

He considers the possible explanations. The obvious: coincidence. Utterly improbable coincidence, however risible in its absurdity or frightening in its accuracy. Another still, more flights of fancy than real considerations: the many infinite ways time could theoretically operate, beyond this linear march from moment to moment, or in fact anything beyond his comprehension, like the deterministic conception of time where the past and present and future are happening simultaneously in the coiling warp of a shapeless space-time manifold. Lastly, and most ridiculously: he is asleep or comatose, and this is all some cruel, maddening, detail-oriented dream.

Sitting right at the ledge of the window, he regards the sight before him. On the bed, Oliver is fast asleep. Elio traces the declivities, the curves along his back. White sheets curled, thin and froth-like, rising with élan. The Grecian finesse of it all, and how he spent the night before tracing it with his mouth with nearly cartographic precision, set to the syncopated fugue of their hearts and lungs.

He thinks of the Oliver he wrote about, the one he might have somehow desired to be—to inhabit—set against the one before him now, completely different and yet impossibly familiar. A person he would instead rather possess. How mortifying would it be, he thinks, to admit now to this ridiculous thought, this selfish pipe dream, a fluke that his mind cannot resist from asserting as divine providence, and the twisted skein of reverence and desire settling in him.

“ _You’re here,_ ” he whispers, the way he’d have liked to, just yesterday. With all the trembling wonder he can bring to bear.

He doesn't even truly know who this Oliver is. He only knows what he imagines. And yet…

 

* * *

 

Oliver wakes up naked in his hotel bed, crumpled white sheets piled on top, and immediately, the thought that comes to him is that this has all been one huge mistake. 

Whatever business he imagined he’d had in B.—whatever gaps in his mind and phantom longings, whatever answers he thought he might find here, after reading a story he had been convinced had been plucked straight out of the clockwork underside of his very mind, the missing pieces fitting with a startling accuracy. It doesn't matter. And now, here he is, with someone he’d never met before, who existed hundreds of thousands of miles away writing about _his life_. No. Anyhow. It doesn't matter. All of that is beside the point.

The point is this: his life has been carefully planned. He’s made arrangements to put a downpayment on a ring. And this… whatever this is…

It's inconvenient, to say the least.

He watches Elio, curled on a ledge against the windowsill, leaning over with a cigarette pinched between his fingers, apparently deeply absorbed by the view outside. Oliver stares at him and feels a radiance, a quiet bliss, a deep and nameless tenderness cutting through the purity of his despair. Then, it wrenches him back into despair so thoroughly he feels out of breath. He’d always claimed he knew himself well. Now he’s not so sure. 

He starts to feel physically ill. The room begins to spin. Maybe he's hungover.

Maybe he's gone insane.

Then, Elio turns to him, and Oliver calms under the brilliance of his regard.

They hold each other’s gaze.

“Hey,” Oliver says.

Elio puts out the cigarette. “How long have you been awake?”

“Not very.”

“Something wrong?”

“What makes you think that?” 

Elio crosses the room and rests on the edge of the mattress. And Oliver, who is only just discovering that he barely knows himself at all, leans closer to press a kiss on Elio’s shoulder.

“Everything is perfect,” he lies.

Proximity can have transformative qualities. Chemical exhalations of one fruit ripening the rest in a basket overnight. The serendipitous placement of colors on a plane distorting the qualities of an image. People to places, to art, to other people. And now here, with his proximity to Elio, to B., he somehow feels changed, however callow or laughable the notion. As if his mind had been refurbished overnight. Or broken and made completely new.

He pulls Elio closer, mouth open in an invitation that Elio takes. Tongues twined, legs twined, fingers twined, repeating what they’d done only a few hours ago. The sheets rustle and fall to the floor. Oliver finds it funny that he might have felt a change sweep over the whole of his being overnight, but if there’s one thing that’s remained intact, the constitution of his self-control is still undeniably, utterly worthless.

And later, when Elio laughs, holding him close under the shower's spray, he finds himself wishing things could always be this way. Or that his life had gone differently. Or that he could rewrite the one he currently has.

It's the most childish thought he's had in a while. God, what the hell is he doing here?

But still… but still.

Perhaps when he goes back he can pretend that none of this ever happened.

In the noon they walk through B., picking up where they left off on their aimless tour. They come to the piazza when Oliver stops, suddenly struck by what he presumes to be a moment of recognition. At the bookstore in the corner, he spots a man he’s certain he’s met before and gives a small wave. The man looks up and meets his gaze. When he realizes who it is (a poet, esteemed in some niche circles) he shakes his head and tries to move along, shaking off a deep embarrassment. Honest mistake. Funny, he thinks, that ever since his self-inflicted displacement to B., all he might have come to are false recognitions and misapprehensions.

Except the man suddenly waves back to him, coming closer as he does. He weaves past some people, keeping that one damned hand raised still.  

Elio tugs Oliver by the shoulder. “Is that? How do you know Alfredo?”

Oliver balks. “I don’t think I know him personally, but he certainly seems to have mistaken me for someone who does.”

Then, finally, the poet arrives. He claps a hand on Oliver’s shoulder. “You two, again!” He says.    

Elio and Oliver look at each other, baffled. They turn back to the poet.

“It’s been quite a while since Roma, but I had recognized your work the moment I came across it, and somehow never forgot about that night. The philosopher. The musician—oh, and novelist! Prodigious stuff," the poet says, his hands moving with an animated zest. "Talented with the drinks, as I recall," he continues, pointing a finger to Oliver.

God, he's a madman.

Elio, bless him, somehow knows exactly how to play along. “Forgive me, it’s been ages since… since Rome. How was it again, that evening?”

“A gathering for the release of a book, if I recall correctly. Quite an eventful night. Lovely breeze, whole bar to ourselves. Someone had too much to drink.” Then the poet turns and winks at Elio, whose face might have been frozen in a state of shock.

And that’s when it hits Oliver. “That’s right. We had the same publisher. He invited me over to your tour stop.”

The poet nods, as enthused as ever. "Ah, and much fun was had."

“We spoke of _la sindroma._ I made martinis,” Oliver continues, chasing the memory down. _Chiusura_ , someone yells, over the sound of piano keys, light, somber, _sotto voce_ , then pivoting to pick up speed. “Someone was playing one of the Goldberg Variations…”

He turns to Elio, whose expression begins to shift into something like mild terror.

And then Elio, despite the dawning plain on his face, says cooly, “I was showing off. That’s right. How could I have possibly forgotten?”  

 

* * *

 

Elio remembers… something. He’s not sure what he remembers, or misremembers. Memory is never accurate. It only remembers what it wants to, or what it cannot let go, as much as it hopes to try. Funny, that even your own thoughts, your own perception of the world, you can barely begin to trust. It can only light a fire revealing the landscape of truth, and even then, it would only be a version of the truth, and not the very thing itself. Descartes would have gone mad in the modern world. 

The air starts to feel unseasonably hot, even for the summer. His skin starts to feel hot. He puts his hand to his face and realizes he’s bleeding from the nose.  

“Excuse me, it must be the weather,” he says, as smoothly as he can manage. “I have to take care of this.” Covering the lower half of his face, he darts for a water fountain at the corner.

“It’s been lovely to see you again. Please excuse the both of us,” he hears Oliver say from afar.   

Over the pouring water, he hears footsteps rushing, muffled knocks on stone coming up right beside him. And then a hand, light, almost hovering, placed at the dip of his back. He pushes his face closer and lets the stream fall through, up to his hair, until Oliver pulls him gently by the shoulder. Elio coughs water out. He realizes the hand on his shoulder has been trembling.

“Elio…” Oliver says. His voice is trembling too.

“This is fucked up!” Elio yells, immediately regretting it, if only for the scene he might cause. He stomps off into a corner to bury his face in his hands. He lets himself slide down with his back to the wall until he’s crouching down, nearly sitting on the cobblestone. 

“Elio,” Oliver says again.

“Why wouldn’t I remember?” He says, garbled through the cavern of his palms.

“You did.” 

His face is bloody and drenched. He probably looks insane.

“Evidently not,” he bristles.

And everything is silent. He buries his face deeper into his hands, unsure what to do next. He hears Oliver sit down on the ground, right next to him. Their shoulders brush.

“You wrote about it,” Oliver says.

“What?” Elio looks up at Oliver, frozen, valiantly keeping the spring coil of his distress under the pressure of his resolve. The last of it, anyway.

“More than a decade ago I came to B.—that much I know. I remember fishing. I remember poker. I came out with a finished manuscript but I can hardly recall much about working on it. Or much else about B., in fact. I was always conscious of these gaps in my memory. A whole period of my life practically razed from my mind, and it didn't make sense. I could never let it go. And then I read your book. And somehow… some things started snapping into place.”

Elio buries his face between his knees. “Don’t say that…” he says, oh so quietly.

“Somehow… somehow you wrote about it, somebody I’d never spoken to or met managed to make sense of some mysterious fissure I thought would just stay with me for the rest of my life."

"No…"

"Elio, I didn’t want to sound like I had an agenda. I only came here to see B.”

“Don’t say that!” Elio yells now, the spring coil snapping loose.

Oliver moves closer. Elio flinches. Then, he looks at Oliver again. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I thought you should know.” 

Elio sinks his head lower.  _Because you thought I should know?_ Someone’s else’s voice says, in his head. Almost mocking him, pivoting to a quiet dawning.  _Because I thought you should know_ , someone responds.  _Because I wanted you to know._

And then it hits him. That throat-clench of disquiet. What could possibly be on the other side of whatever reckoning awaits the both of them? Here, at the very threshold of revelation, Elio yields. His face is wet. 

“Why would I forget you?” he whispers, quivering with fear.

And Oliver, somehow, impossibly unruffled, simply says, “we’ll figure it out.” 

Propelled by the full force of his fear, Elio gets up. “I need to leave,” he says, stomping off to his bike. Then, he stops abruptly. Without looking back, he says, "don’t follow me,” practically begging.

They stand there for the next few seconds, trapped under the strain of some strange new unease, neither having anything to say.

And so Elio takes his bike and leaves. 

 

* * *

 

San Francisco feels like an entire world away. Crackling with the countless starts and stops of its network of gold rushes, its frisson felt through the steep drops of its inclines, the air heavy and perennially dusted with salt, practically ablaze. Oliver, in his rental car, turns to his companion in the bucket seat beside him. A box of old things all to do with B., mostly bare in its contents. A portion of his life he’s chosen to erase. A rather brief portion.

A few weeks. Practically a blip. Like extracting a wound. Blood-letting. A clean slate. It should be all right. It has to be all right.

It just has to be.

Earlier that day he’d looked at the span of the city from a borrowed room, considering its falls and upsweeps, the shimmer of the coastline from afar, the patchwork of houses and buildings and city semiotics and blinking traffic lights, wondering if there’s still time to turn back. He’s been in California for a month, under specific instructions to set up some sort of temporary arrangement, anything to make sense of his condition after the procedure. As if he were not here, on the opposite side of the country, solely for some experimental procedure.

He's made some bad decisions. This can't possibly be the worst.

It could crack top five.

Top three.

It can't possibly be all bad. Otherwise, why consider it at all?

But now he’s here. With his imaginary burden sunk into a single carton box of drafts of his manuscript, postcards, handwritten missives, a single photograph. Here on his way to a strange place promising to strike it all from the record, to effect some sort of resolution for the low-hum yet inexorable misery that’s hounded him ever since he'd boarded that train out of Rome. He couldn't look back then. Now, he'll never have to look back at all.

Oliver had been warned that letters would be sent to all involved parties. To warn them of the procedure, and to maintain the illusion of his life on the other side of it. Cleansed of this… stain. No, not stain. This inconvenience. No… a ghost. The ghost of a life he can't ever have, luring him into its impregnable abyss.

He tries not to think about how Elio might take the news.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. The jig is up! It's an Eternal Sunshine fusion! Also, the corniest thing I've ever written. The corniness I wish to see in the world.
> 
> 2\. I said I wasn't interested in arguing pedantry. But… but! While Eternal Sunshine is usually catalogued under Science Fiction (and, in fact, cropping up in conversations about the reconsolidation and suppression of trauma through medical innovation), I find myself having great difficulty imagining the tight wefts and tangled gyres making up the network of our mind and seeing the snatching of any select part as anything but witchcraft. And so: Magical Realism it is. Despite the presence of science. And anyway, what's science for most is still all magic to me.
> 
> 3\. I don't want to insult anybody's intelligence, but in the interest of soothing my nagging mind, I feel the need to clarify: like the earlier chapters, there are jumps in time. I mean, actually just the last bit. But you get it.
> 
> 4\. Apologies to nobody but André Aciman.


	3. A vision

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Caveat viator: [jazz hands] ~*experimental structure*~

Pitch black darkness. A low mechanical hum. Switches flick—one, two, three. A crackle of light. A sudden flare of blistering white. A hollow, bone-deep dread. Then, he plunges. 

Wefts and warps pass into and through a pried-open mind, cutting, wrenching, weaving and threading the tidal sweep of its electric vistas. Plucked, flung, beaten into a pulsing well of firing neurons, Elio finds himself barreling down the turbulent groundswell of memory. Vaulting and heaving, thrown from luminous moment to moment, images flicker, dissolving into the grain-fuzz static of a faulty signal. Across the shimmering roadworks of everything and everyone he’s ever known, the lights go off one by one, to pitch black, until he finds himself drifting alone in the nothing-expanse of his photo-bleached mind.

In the middle of a mirror-smooth sea, his body floats freely in repose. Everything is quiet. A lone fly drifts in and lands on the soft skin of his wrist. He watches it perch, settle, fly out.

Then, a shatter.

Something erupts out of the dammed-up corner of his mind, vile and violent and bursting. He falls down a trapdoor of false starts and arid evenings and secret yearnings, flung at the foot of a stone monument, floodlights scorching his eyes as he drops his dignity on the pavement. A finger traces the bottom of his lip and he quivers, overcome with a hungry ache and unrest. He watches somebody else stride into a room, shamelessly donning his shorts, and he is fear-throttled, thrill-pulsed, mouth agape, parched. He is struck by the suppleness of a peach and his stomach twists, mind floating the image of a rippling, marbled, faceless Apollo, bursting star-like and storming through his imagination, his body, his life. He traces a long and lustrous summer in staves, a sweeping aria of flutters and crests and heart-tugs and foot-touches and flurried bedding and lip-smacking apricot juice. He takes someone’s hand climbing an upslope of stone, sun-stung and gasping, claiming a kiss to mark his most Pyrrhic of victories. He watches a train twisting out of Rome, into an interminable cloud-mottled sky. And everything falls and falls in an endless stream of incandescent revelation and Elio breathes and for some reason, it sounds like sobbing.

“Elio, what are you doing?” Someone says, from nowhere. Footfalls ripple. Elio turns.

There’s nobody there. A light switches on in the far horizon, a pulsing glow, pin-like then swelling. Elio runs to it. Someone is standing in front of a screen projection. Something in Elio smoothens and stills. The video flares and fuzzes and Elio falls into blackness.

He opens his eyes.

He is seventeen, on his bed, painfully conscious of the Earth’s diurnal slouch from second to second, hauling its cosmic heft toward midnight. The door creaks open, only slightly. His breath seizes, waiting, thrilling, dreading. The door slides, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, the second stretching and stretching and stretching until…

Nothing.

He gets up and dashes out, heart racing as he stands before an Escher-warped labyrinth of his family’s home in B. And standing there at the end of the sun-glazed coalescing of catenary staircases and locked doorways that line his treasured and most wretched of summers, someone sits by the balcony, watching the gleaming orchard below.

Elio runs. He grabs Oliver’s wrist.

“What the hell is going on?” He demands.

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

His grip turns into a fist. Oliver vanishes.

Elio looks out the balcony and the ground buckles, throwing him down whitened sky, crashing onto a bed of grass. He opens his eyes and finds himself looking out onto the secret berm he’d idle at, a lifetime ago. 

He looks up and Oliver is there, lying on the grass, right next to him, and the sun is warm and the air is still. His eyes trace the soft outline of Oliver’s salt-lifted hair. Elio finds himself impulsively reaching up to touch it, just to make sure. 

Oliver leans into his hand and his hair is cloud-like, and Elio moves his hand down and strokes a cheek flush from the heat of the season.

“Hi,” Oliver whispers.

“Hey,” Elio sighs.

His fingers busy themselves tracing down a line—cheek, jaw, neck, shoulder, arm. To make sure it’s all solid and real and there. Cognizance comes to him slowly, ferried by the breeze, the leisurely drip of that one long summer. He finds himself clutching at Oliver’s arm thinking, maybe, just maybe, if he holds on hard enough he can keep it there. Here, in the internecine center of his most secreted of memories, stowed away and trapped in glowing amber. Not the golden age of his life but rather the illumination that lays bare the rest of the path, heart clasped and moored even as it pulses out and far and away.

His grip tightens.

“You’re leaving,” Elio says, breathlessly, only just arriving at the cusp of understanding.

Slowly, Oliver plucks out the fingers clutching his arm, one by one. He lifts Elio’s hand close to his face, examining the soft skin of his palm before pressing the fingertips to his mouth, kissing them one by one.

“I was always going to leave. And you were always so eager for me to leave, weren't you?”

“That wasn’t what it was.” 

“I know it wasn’t.” 

Oliver drops his hand. They lie there, before the water, on the grass, under the sun, somewhere in the corner of Elio’s mind.

“You erased me first,” Elio says.

Oliver shifts, resting on his side, regarding Elio with an appraising eye. “Maybe it’s better this way.”

“How?”

“Haven’t the faintest idea.” Oliver says. He huffs out a laugh. Then he sighs, amused. Vexed. “Perhaps not. Better to have loved and lost?”

Elio rolls his eyes, mostly to ease the sting from dammed-up water eager to break loose. “Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?” 

The wind sighs. The grass bends. The water ripples, glittering out to the moss-clung edges, their glassy reflections curved and warped and shimmering. Over the horizon, the sun dangles, looming, taunting finality in the heft of its slow nectar drop.

Oliver turns to him. “I’m already gone anyway,” he says.

He takes Elio’s face in his hands, pulls him closer, and somehow the first thought that comes to Elio is the taste and texture of a ripened peach. And they sink, thorough in their consumption, tracing a line from lips to teeth to tongue to elsewhere and elsewhere, inhales and exhales coalescing, fear and ache blurring, skin dragging, hearts quickening as they wait out for sundown.

Oliver holds Elio closer and whispers something to his ear.

The sky bleeds purple. The clouds drift.

 

* * *

 

Morning arrives, unannounced.

The berm is still, but to Oliver it yaws, pivoting along its axis, flipping to its mirror underside. Achiral and connected, bridgeways collapsing, fusing, foisting revelation.

He walks, climbs, slips. He weaves through knots of ancient stone, its sedate surface cracking to let loose life, flaring, breathing, daunting in its exuberance. B. slides before his very eyes, oil-slick, vertiginous, fiery and relentless, slowly peeling out its ceaseless wonder with every step. And the pavement looks back, the grass pathways look back, the berm looks back, the water looks back, daring him to reach in, to plummet, to switch on the lights and unlock the doorways and uncover its beating heart and remember.

The wind howls in anguish, but that is only his metaphor. A blackbird flies out, indifferent to his stuttered breaths.

In the flickering theatre of his patchwork memory, a train pulls out and out of Rome, but the end snags, a tether catching, tugging, persistent, hauling him back, diesel and fire-borne, following tracks lined in code stowed between the pages of a paperback semaphore. Heart-bound, soul-bound, entrapped in salt, forever looking back, within and without.

A memory hounds him, grief settling in, taking up residence in the grass, seeping through the water, perching atop the trees. The fallow stuff of his youth that should have faded out with age leaps back up, his mirror-self, gleaming in the water and rising out. A self he claims for his own, Oliver only in name, but otherwise, somebody else. And that somebody moves closer, daring him to speak. To perhaps make a fool of himself, or else die.

He remembers a story spoken to him a lifetime ago, about a knight and a princess and a pall cast over the tangle of their lives. As far as he's aware, the knight fails to move. But there is a version of the story where the knight doesn’t fudge.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. This chapter wasn't part of the original script, but rather inspired by a friend who dropped a teensy suggestion, which I proceeded to trip over, then this happened. If you are thinking: "wow, too corny," I am nodding my head right behind you. I mean, honestly? Hard same.
> 
> 2\. Apologies to the peach scene, Sufjan Stevens, and the searing volta of Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo, which I cribbed off of like _a lot_ , a lot.


	4. A step away

There’s a quiet violence to awakenings.

Elio climbs out of the clutches of sleep to a hostile, bruised fruit late noon sky. He covers up the irritable tick of the watch with a fist, pushes off from the divan’s quicksand pull, notes the oppressive slant of the mirror across and tries to scrub out the redness around his eyes. From the window, the wind whistles, and the memory of a train moving out of an empty station swoops in to snap him out of his trance. His father’s study sinks back into its indifference, to leave Elio alone with the unknowable fog of his anger.

He crosses the room and opens the door slowly, encumbered by the dread of his own intrusion. He’s still not quite sure what he would have hoped to find or if it would have meant much. The images form in his mind like sandcastles built right along the edge of the shoreline, crumbling and drifting out just as soon as they take shape.

His slow, careful, single step is betrayed by the heart struggling to break out of the floorboards.

And of course, of course, right there on the couch are his parents, unerring in their mysterious ability to augur his every move. His mother immediately looks up and motions for him to join them.

“Elio, _ici._ ” _Come here._

Elio settles on the edge of the seat delicately, fiercely embarrassed despite himself. “ _Je vous ai fait attendre_?” He asks quietly. _Have I kept you waiting?_

“Only a bit.” his father responds, with a small hand wave. Then, looking right at him, follows up, “find what you were looking for?”

Elio shakes his head.

His mother scoffs and slaps his father’s wrist. They exchange frowns, and Elio watches the pantomime conversation play on their faces, trying to decipher their strange private language. His father gapes and his mother rolls his eyes. Now Elio truly feels the full force of tumbling back to his youth.

“What?” He says, rather petulantly.

His mother reaches into his father’s jacket pocket and pulls out a small yellowing envelope. There’s a cursive script on the back. His father hands him the envelope, with some reluctance.

“There were instructions to wipe off anything relevant, but we thought we’d keep this just in case.”

Elio Perlman, the inscription reads. He inspects the torn and curled flap, the eggshell blotches and fine craquelure of relics. The sound of the beating heart that’s moved from the floorboards to the folded paper inside.

“It’s been opened,” Elio says.

“You’ve already read it,” His father says. “A while back.”

He reads the note. Once. And again. And again. He cannot fathom the possibility of a specific memory being blocked out. Or what he could have possibly done to merit the nature of that disposal. Guilt and frustration and fear rise out of him, but for some reason, it comes out as laughter.

“This whole time…” He takes a deep breath. Then, he turns to his father. “What happened?”

And they tell him. About that one summer in B. About the letter that came to the same place, the summer after. About how Elio, in furious disbelief, came to San Francisco. About they’d never heard from him until similar letters came to them. How strange it seemed, as though nothing had changed. That is, until the book. And then, the other day, with the stacks and stacks of documents.

His father places a hand on his shoulder. “For what it’s worth, Elio, I’m glad it didn’t take. Whatever you decide now…”

His mother reaches over to rest her right hand to his heart. “Nous t’aimons.”  _We love you._

As his parents rise off the couch, his mother kisses him on the forehead. And they leave him there, with the yellowing note, in the corner of the room, under the gloom of the bruised apricot sky.

 

* * *

 

The dirt path back to town snakes and weaves. Oliver follows the long trail back to some place in a lit-up corner in the back of his mind. A place where the Earth might have stopped in its rotations. To some nebulous haze of memory that comes to him through terse negotiations and interrogations, as a single asymptotic trajectory moving closer and closer but never quite landing, in a vicious light that shrivels and snuffs out whatever it holds up to revere.

The memory mostly eludes him but he remembers the feeling. Performing all the roles and fulfilling all the demands and perfecting all the tests of his pristine, polished, checklist-and-paperwork life. The privilege and responsibilities and virtues impressed upon him, and the spotless record expected, all of a sudden sullied by some new, daunting, relentless thing bursting out of the floodgates. In the form of B., its thorn-snag, looming tendrils, that faceless somebody who dared pry out the hatch that secreted some unutterable desire, chasing him down until he yielded.

And to think, he thought he had been so careful.

Oliver looks up at an old monument, tracing a hand along the steel loops of the gate, all the way to the other side. Right above, the verdigris soldier dedicated to Piave stands frozen, reaching as if to vouchsafe him something of great consequence.

There’s only the sound of the evening breeze.

When he crosses to the other side, Elio is somehow right there, staring up at the cracked stone rising up. Then, he looks down and meets his gaze.

“You’re here,” Elio says, like he can’t quite believe it.

Oliver means to cross over but somehow his feet are affixed. And in the endless stretch of five seconds that seem to go on and on forever—trapping the birds in the same point in the sky, holding still each speck of dust hanging in the air, in one sustained moment of maddening stillness—Elio crosses over and comes to him 

“You need to read this,” he says, holding out a small envelope. 

Oliver reads the letter once through, and then out loud, as if caught under a heated torch—a criminal forced into admission. Erased from memory. Please never mention their relationship to him again.

He looks up at Elio. “How is this even possible?”

Elio explains what he’s uncovered, and what he’s managed to remember. A story that starts with a small car rolling into a villa one summer and ends with the letter a year later. As he listens to the story, Oliver thinks of the unerring placement of its details in the forever distorted and dimmed-out parts inside the creases and corners of his mind. The way certainty betides the dreamer waking up from a long and lifeless sleep, to find the bed, the sheets, the window and the light peering through, just as expected, in all in the right places. And at the end of the story, Elio only smiles, somehow somber in a way that Oliver cannot place. He suspects it might be relief.

“Does it still seem a little unreal to you?” Elio asks him.

He considers the letter in his hand. The wan smile on Elio’s face, and then the spray of sunspots from his hands up to his wrists to the creases at the side of his eyes. He thinks of the strange allure of B., in all its distorted time and light, its cruel indifference to the serpentine garden of pillars he’d scrupulously set up through the years, for whatever future plans he'd dared consign himself to, every single concession he’d resigned himself to, and whatever plans had been made for him well before his own birth.

And how could Oliver stop his life now, just to chase down some abstract suspicion?

“It’s clear to me that wasn’t supposed to happen. The two of us, meeting again,” he says.

Elio only laughs, low and acrid, almost a scoff. “I had a feeling you were going to say something like that.”

Oliver looks down at the letter again. “There are commitments I intend to keep,” he says, untenable as his defense is.

Elio only nods and gives him a half-hearted slant of a smile.

Time starts to readjust itself. A breeze ripples through. Footsteps flutter somewhere close by. The lights from the street lamps begin to dot the slate and stone floor, one by one. Oliver thinks he can hear the sound of a watch ticking. A bike rolling by, and the faint clink of its bell. A fly buzzing just behind his ear. The air whispering, trapped in B.’s forever torpor. A sharp, exasperated exhale cutting through the white noise.

“Well, say something,” Oliver demands.

Elio shrugs. “What else is there to say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Made your mind up?”

“I don’t know,” Oliver immediately says. He shakes his head, realizing his mistake. “Yes.”

Elio laughs. Maybe at Oliver, or maybe at himself for even trying. He lifts his head up, making a concentrated effort not to look Oliver in the face. “You’re not going to go back and erase me again are you?”

“No,” Oliver says, absolutely certain this time. “Didn’t exactly hold up the first time, did it?”

“Good.”

Oliver wants to say something, but nothing he could possibly say now feels up to scratch. In his mind a voice inquires, is it better to speak or to die? Standing before the footlights of desire, he finds himself bereft.

“Is this it, then?” Elio asks.

Oliver still finds himself unable to speak.

That should probably tell Elio everything he needs to know.

Elio makes as if to leave, but hesitates and moves closer instead. He lifts a hand to Oliver’s face, tracing the bottom lip with his thumb, then following the thumb with his lips. For a moment it feels like B. truly might be trapped in the shimmer of an endless golden age. The wind holding its breath in its perfect stasis. Just as Oliver can sense the elastic stretch of his self-control strain and strain, in this still point in the turning world. And just as it might threaten to snap, Elio takes one step back.

Elio’s hand is still on his face. “I’ll see you around, Oliver,” he says quietly. “Later.”

He turns and walks away, leaving Oliver there, by the steel fence, with that low inexorable hum of despair, under the shadow of the monument, the soldier and the felled bird, mocked yet again by B. and its uncanny ability to rend apart and snatch away whatever it was he thought he knew about himself. The leaves cannot help but tremble at the fluttering breeze, just as the evening cannot help but coat the sky in its blue conflagration, and yet even in their unwavering nonchalance, Oliver imagines something conspiratorial about their gloom. 

The view of B. shrinks away from the rearview mirror of a car. Oliver settles back into his long sleep.


	5. And again

Time marks its ruin in green. Bronze cast bodies bloom seafoam bruises, battering every inch of its surface as the years pass. Their dollar-colored bodies settle underwater, the swell of their curves fading into the salted green of the current, where a head or an arm will crack off and one can never know, only wonder about the weight of their expressions, the ache of their gestures, the softness of a downturned lip or a finger coyly raised just so. 

Lush foliage leaps out of the ground to embrace an estate somewhere in Italy, saturating it under its generous shade, under the greenest of greens. Apricots and their blossoms dangle off the trees to drop and shrivel into the grass. Green swells in waves restorative, destructive, tender, indifferent. Then there is the inevitable return to this worldly condition. Green stains things into torpid oblivion, or things return to green in nature's cascade, wasteland or bounty eventually coming to possess all things in its sublime grip.

For three years, a dearth of green. Three years of cycles in an expense of spirit. New York to Paris to Berlin to Stockholm to Milan, to here. More people ensconced into his attic of hearts, impressions stowed away, gathered in rows, slowly collecting a patina of dust—the low hum of a bass guitar sitting next to the clink of an anchor dropping into the sea next to the gurgle of a bottle next to red hair, brown hair, frizzed hair, somehow never blonde. A sheet catalogue of faces, a spinning record of voices make up the blur of the rest of his twenties and settle in the margins.

Elio is in Italy when he receives a photograph. A torso dredged from the Adriatic, bronze bruised green, shoulders poised. He imagines what could have been the rest of it. The unsparing gaze he might expect, or perhaps something that spoke to the soft curves of its comportment. The inscription at the back is just as cryptic, opening with the first line from the Enchiridion. _Some things are in our control and others not._ The envelope itself is stained green at the edges. He reads the letter again and again, trying to parse out the words, the image, the inscription that seem to say nothing, filling the gaps in meaning with the certainty of anybody hounded by the force of faith.

His suspicions take him all the way to America, to the sun-sunken inertia of the West Coast, to a campus of brick and clay, dotted with endless lines of swaying palm trees. Something about the East Coast reminds Elio of B. Maybe the heat, or the sedate cut of its scenery, or the way it seems to be eternally caught in a sheath of green’s green. The campus he’d intruded wound in a labyrinthine curl of foliage and snatches of brick and tanned earth. Brambles and ivy stick out the walls and the windows and fences, the natural world and its charged dissent assaulting the gray and rust slabs supplanted across its dominion.

Elio finds his way to the back of an auditorium, for a lecture he’d looked up weeks in advance, and ducked his head down and attempted to remain discreet for the entire duration of it. Except somehow he’d found himself looking up for some moments, taken in partly by a familiar aural lure, its effortless panache, its expectant manner that demanded the full weight of his regard.

“Consider the Heraclitean fragment: Time is a child playing a game of draughts—its cryptic suggestion that Nature and Being operate in terms of contingency and innocent caprice. Nature unfolds like a child at play, making and unmaking the rules as it goes along. Vis-à-vis what we’ve covered on the causalistic ontology that implies mathematical certainty, where Nature—being absolute—begets no surprises…”

And here, in this oddly fitting moment, the lecturer looks up, suddenly meeting Elio’s gaze. He hesitates for what must be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second. Elio nods, and the lecturer responds with a raised eyebrow before returning to his through-line.

“Here, the present holds sway. Nature and Being self-renews, starting the game over as they please, again and again.”

Oliver turns to the board. Elio drops the pretense and begins to watch him in earnest, mindlessly cataloging the lines along his eyes and a few streaks of gray, a cartoon Band-Aid wrapped along a finger where he’d expected something else. And here Elio was, catching himself in trying to gauge if there could possibly be room for him to intrude into Oliver's life once more. Here he was, presuming the Oliver he’d come to face would be everything he’d expected him to be. The part of him that remembers being warned about the futility of expectation starts to rattle his ribcage and pull at his ankles. He sits through the rest of the lecture seething in silence. God help him if he can’t put this to rest, perhaps once and for all.

The lecture ends earlier than scheduled. Oliver idles by the desk as the room empties out, sieve-like, until only the two of them remain. Some dammed-up, hatch-sealed feeling in Elio starts to knock on the borders, hauling him down the stairs to the platform, in a fraught few seconds marked only by the echo of his footsteps.

Elio has rehearsed this moment. Buoyed by the boldest of intentions, he looked up the schedule, navigated the campus, sat through the lecture, and finally walked down the steps, he’d prepared to lay down everything he’d hoped to bear in some suave one-liner, precise in its severity, spring-tight in its clarity. But somehow on the way, his throat had gone bone-dry. He bites back a cough as Oliver looks at him, expectant. 

“Hi,” Elio says, instead.

Oliver, predictably, does have a smooth rejoinder at the ready. “Do I know you? I feel like we’ve met before.”

“I was in the area so I thought I'd…”

“Am I glad to see you.” Oliver means it.

Elio looks down at the cartoon Band-Aid. Then to the glint of that familiar gold star. Then to fix on seafoam green eyes, and the slips of creases that suggest the years he’d missed. Some divine hand tugs at his mouth and yanks it into a smile. 

Oliver starts to seesaw on the balls of his feet, and Elio props himself up on the potent tremor of discomfort seizing the room, oddly uplifted by its presence. He notes the mottled skin blooming on Oliver’s neck and figures at least it’s not just him.

“Isn’t this the part where you show me around?” Elio suggests.

Oliver huffs out a laugh. “Okay then. Follow me.” He pulls the door with a dramatic flourish, and they step out.

Sunlight lathers the path ahead, green and brick and concrete stippled with people. They plunge into the knots of human exuberance that make up the sprawling university. Students flit through the pavement, luxuriate on the field, clink the bells on their bikes as they scurry past. A student waves in their direction and calls out, ’sup, Doc. Oliver nods at the student and keeps moving. The people index of Elio’s mind rolls out unbidden, cataloging the stately campus and its frothing viridescence, the idling students, the people of Oliver’s little life, with their painted faces and faded denim and Kool-Aid hair and infectious zest. They pass by a tennis court, and Elio steps up the bleachers to walk along the bench, looking down at Oliver, then to the match on the field.

“This wasn’t how I imagined this place,” he says.

A volley from the baseline. An exchange of smooth groundstrokes.

“In a good way, hopefully?”

Elio keeps his gaze to the players. A heavy backhand, then a wrong-footed smack. One of the players trails off to pick up the ball and serve. “I was kind of picturing something worthy of the Stoics,” he says. 

Oliver stops. He brings a hand to his face to stifle a laugh. “Oh god, course,” he says, mildly embarrassed.

He’s still not entirely certain what he’d meant to say with the photograph, or the inscription. It had been something he recognized as being part of his bleached-out life from B, a line cast out to sea, caught by some person he barely recognized but imagined to know so well.

Oliver considers this version of Elio before him. His hair, his demeanor, the crisp shirt and trim trousers tastefully folded right above the ankle. The way everything had been kept in place just so. The precocious Elio of his imagination emerges, along with the inscrutable version of him he’d met again in Italy years ago, and the musician he’d discreetly followed through the years. Three Elios jostling around, spiriting out of the air to superpose over the new Elio swanning into his life, whoever he is, presuming to kick the feet from his stool and knock Oliver out of his slumber. 

Something’s amiss here. Oliver feels it in the stutter of their steps and their silence. Whatever happened to them in B. might as well have been fiction. Elio strides the bleachers above, his attention monopolized by the heated match. One of the players scrambles and misses the ball, landing on the deuce. Oliver consciously corrects his slouch as he moves along.

Elio hops to the ground again, blocking Oliver’s path. He takes Oliver’s left hand and lifts it up, in the manner of a vassal to their liege.

“What’s the story here?” Elio asks.

Oliver, of course—stupid him—channels his unease into drivel. “Oh, I was fixing the wiring at my house, the lights in my son’s bedroom just kept flickering and, well, I got this nasty shock from an exposed line, a rat must’ve frayed it—”

At Elio’s one raised brow, Oliver shuts up.

Elio lets go. “Thought you were married?” He says. 

Oliver exhales. “I was.”

“And now?” 

Oliver shrugs. “Guess Annie knew something about me that even I hadn’t been aware of, at the time.”

Elio only nods, face shifting to a blankness betrayed only by the glistening in his eyes.

Oliver looks away, then downward. “Ever look at the life you've led and wonder if all it will ever amount to is a series of your own cancellations?”

Elio turns, rubbing his eyes with the hem of his sleeve. He walks ahead, silence full of speech. Oliver trails behind in his stunted pace, nerves altering the weight of his steps, the slope of the ground.

“Is that what happened when you erased me?” Elio asks, a little too casually. As if it were a private joke of theirs.

“Elio…”

Elio lets out a sound and Oliver cannot tell if it’s a sob or a scoff, or a laugh at his expense. “It’s funny, I was agonizing over the possibility of bringing it up. It felt unkind, but part of me was desperate to know. And here you are, doing the work all on your own,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” Oliver says, almost soundlessly.

“It’s fine,” Elio says, a little too loudly. Then, he corrects himself. “I mean, it doesn’t bother me. Not anymore.” He shrugs. “Things were different.”

No words come to Oliver. They keep walking forward.

The sight before them spills out in a shock of green. Oliver remembers a monument in the middle of a small town, somewhere in Italy, where he’d been thrown into a lifetime ago. He can see it now, unchanging through the decades. The same fallow grounds, the same sunken rocks and sand leading up to the sea, the cold water from the mountains pouring into a quiet berm. All that lost time. Everything he dared raze clean surging back in a vengeful wave.

“Suppose I’d chosen differently,” Oliver suggests.

Elio stops and turns to him. Now, he actually is laughing. “Been there, done that,” he says, with a hand-wave.“I'm not much for picking at old wounds.” Oliver knows that he means the book, but even that story ended with an unanswered question.

He's uncertain how to proceed. Through the years, Oliver had taken to wondering, worrying about the garden of his life. The multiple forking paths of what he’d gained and lost, the many possibilities of what lives he could have led. Silly him, to think he could eke drops of joy from a fantasy.

As if on cue, the sun begins its slow descent. They pause to watch it drop from behind an interminable line of palm trees. Oliver looks at Elio. Elio keeps his gaze to the sun. The world is still. They wake up from the daze of their long sleep, to measure the long-drawn, sustained fugue of their lives, in all its syncopated agony and bliss. They consider the chances they’re thrown, the choices they’ve made. Their regrets seem so little now. This is the life they get.

“Made any plans?” Elio asks. He means for tonight, for tomorrow, the years ahead.

Oliver cannot help but beam at him. “I’ve got plenty of time,” he says.

Time has battered and made and remade them, and yet even as the waters flux, the river stays as it is. They’re different now. The world is different now. Yet, even now, revelation comes like a shock—silent, devastating, incandescent. Oliver takes Elio’s hand, to press a kiss on the soft skin of his wrist. Their breaths hold, as if to trap this moment in amber.

Perhaps nothing’s changed here.


End file.
